Recommended Practice Document Discussion/Questions:

Giustina gave a run through of a project the HWF is working on titled Recommended Practice (RP). This would be an optional set of principles, guidelines for Dojos wishing to meet industry best practice standards to meet. There are four principles within RP

Safeguarding Children

Creating a Safe Space

Encompassing the ethos

Communication and Review

The aim of this project is to:

Safeguard Children: ensuring all Dojos are safe spaces for children.

Representation: enable HWF to represent a group of Dojos on an international level allowing partnerships with international companies to be negotiated.

Process & Guidance: To give Dojos looking to start up a structured best practice process to follow.

Sense of Community & involvement: Build upon the existing Community through giving Dojos meeting RP the option to become a member of the Foundation and have a say in how it operates.

It was clarified that RP will be a recommendation there will be no reprimand for Dojos who do not subscribe to it. It was also clarified that there is currently no change to the Charter and all Dojos who sign up to the Charter will be visible on the website. Those who decide to go a step further and meet RP get additional benefits of HWF membership/offers/partnerships. Craig noted that although meeting RP will mean slightly more work to get a Dojo started, but it will be worth the effort. Also it will provide a good framework to answer queries from concerned parties/parents – just need to commit to the effort & ensure how HWF will assure/audit compliance.

What are the benefits?

HWF partnerships (eg. Raspberry Pi’s, free software etc.) will only be available to RP Dojos so that we can negotiate better partnerships for Dojos in the future.

Do these requirements/requests stretch to Data Protection too?

Protection of data in terms of information that is being collected/generated about/by the youths.

Data protection to be added to Recommended Practice.

Q: Are local CoderDojo’s a legal entity?

R: A Dojo is not a legal entity, normally they are considered unincorporated associations (groups of people who come together), unless they have specifically formed a committee and registered as an entity

Action (HWF): Question to legal team: If a Dojo is not registered as a formal entity (just exists as a bunch of people who get together on a Saturday), what requirement is there on the retention and outward sharing of that information, if any, if there is no jurisdictional issues? How do you impose a jurisdiction of what, on something that’s informal.

Vote:

Do you agree with the concept behind the Recommended Practice?

9 – Yes 0 – No

Recommended Practice Themes Discussion/Votes

Votes:

Do you agree with the Safeguarding Children Principle?

9 – Yes 0 – No

Do you agree with the Creating a Safe Space Principle?

9 – Yes 0 – No

Do you agree with the Encompassing the Ethos Principle?

9 – Yes 0 – No 1 – Partially

Action: Can the individual who voted partially on this please email Giustina at [email protected] to expand and clarify on your reasons for this so that it can be discussed by the HWF team and necessary amendments can be made to Recommended Practice.

Do you agree with the Communication and Review Principle?

9 – Yes 0 – No

Do you think that the Data Protection should be added to the Recommended Practice?

9 – Yes 0 – No

Are there any other principles you would like to suggest?

“please keep it agile”

“Perhaps more clarity to “doubting” Dojos about what benefits they will access by being compliant – examples maybe of what they might have missed out on previously??”

“Mutual Dojo self-help, improvement and sharing of best practices. Step-by-step curriculum guidance for beginner Dojos – they don’t have to abide by the suggestions but would be nice to have that support.”

“Recruitment practices for admin & technical mentors; handling funding; dealing with issues with children or admins or mentors (behaviour, etc.);”

“Recommended tools, shared tools would be more useful and would help with communication and review”

What are the next steps?

HWF Response: To take everything that’s been said and flesh out the RP document. It will then be taken to the board on the 15th of May for review. We will then officially kick off the project; brainstorming about the process, guidance compliance etc.

As the next meeting is not for a couple of months any updated/completed documents at this point will be sent around to the Community Committee and feedback can be given at the Committee discretion and we will move forward with it from there. Are Committee members free to take the RP document to their respective Dojos/CoderDojo networks to get collective feedback?

Absolutely, the aim of the committee is to enable feedback from the greater community. Feedback to be given over the next two weeks preferably.

We are not distributing this RP Doc to Dojos yet as it is still not formalised and is in draft phase but we encourage committee members to discuss this with their communities and let us know the feedback.

Action (All):

Please email feedback from CoderDojo community members in your area to [email protected] over the next couple of weeks so that it can be taken into consideration for the development of Recommended Practice.

There has to be a simple way for people to recognise skills and achievements they are getting in the Dojos, not setting a strict standardised testing framework. There could be a wide range of badges from which Dojos could pick and choose depending on their situation.

Project based/skill based?

(CoderDojo Scotland):Project based is possible. There are already badges for specific skills available through Mozilla Open Badges (eg Python, HTML, etc.) so CD Scotland decided to go for ones that are unique to the experiences you have in a Dojo. eg. Working on a group project, helping someone else debug their code, presenting your work to your peers, etc. We wanted to create badges that compliment the badges that are already out there and specific to CoderDojo.

Vote:

Should there be a level of standardisation such as badges/belts? Yes 7, No 0. Action: The Foundation has noted that currently there is an appetite for some form of standardised regarding belts to be devised. This is not a current priority but will be discussed internally. Presently many Dojos operate belts to their own standards which is encouraged. We also encourage Dojos to add to the Open Badges that CoderDojo Scotland have designed. The Foundation will highlight these badges in an upcoming newsletter.